Source: From DICTIONARY OF NORTH CAROLINA BIOGRAPHY edited by William S. Powell. Copyright (c) 1979-1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu

Edwin Wiley Fuller (30 Nov. 1847-22 Apr. 1876), poet and novelist,
was born in Louisburg, Franklin County, the son of Jones Fuller, a
cotton broker and merchant, and of Anna Long Thomas, a lady of
culture, religion, and gentility, who provided a home atmosphere
that nurtured his literary bent. She was the great-granddaughter of
William Richmond, who was the brother-in-law of Sir Peyton Skipwith
of Prestwould, near Boydton, Va. Her grandfather was Colonel
Gabriel Long, of Halifax, whose residence, Quankee, had more than a
state reputation. Colonel Nicholas Long, her great-grandfather, had
been a Continental officer from North Carolina during the American
Revolution.

Contemporary records describe Edwin Wiley Fuller as a man short
in stature; with "eagle eye" and "gentile, winsome manners," he was
respected for the strength of his character. He completed his
secondary education at Louisburg Male Academy during the Civil War
and entered The University of North Carolina as a freshman in the
fall of 1864. After two years' study in Chapel Hill, he returned
home and helped his father with his business for a year. In October
1867 he and his roommate and first cousin, George Gillett Thomas of
Wilmington, enrolled in the University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, from which Fuller received diplomas in the schools
of English literature and moral philosophy in 1868.

Interested since childhood in literary pursuits, Fuller joined
Delta Psi fraternity and was chosen as its anniversary orator his
freshman year. In 1866, he was one of the sophomore declaimers at
commencement. Although he wrote some verse before entering the
university, his first published items were the poems "The Village
on the Tar" and "Requiescam", which appeared in the University
Magazine at Chapel Hill. After a year's lapse his publications
resumed with the printing of a number of items—poems, "The
Angel in the Cloud," "An Elegy, Written on the Rotunda Steps," and
a short story, "The Cat and the Corpse"—in the University
of Virginia Magazine, 1868 spring issue.

Poe, Tennyson, and Dickens were Fuller's favorite writers. Some
of his early poems were parodies"The Village on the Tar" apes
Caroline Norton's famous "Bingen on the Rhine," and his "Lines
Written on an Analytical Geometry" is patterned after Poe's "The
Raven." Another poem, "Requiescam," and his single published short
story, "The Cat and the Corpse," are after the manner of Poe. At
Charlottesville in 1867-68 Fuller and his roommate often made
forays into the Ragged Mountains, about which Poe had written, and
they taught briefly at a rural school.

In a letter written in the spring of 1867, while he was at home
working in his father's store, Fuller expressed dissatisfaction
with the idea of a merchant's career. He said he wanted to be a
lawyer. Because of his father's failing health, however, he
returned to Louisburg in the summer of 1868 after graduating from
college. In a letter of 12 Mar. 1870 Fuller told a friend that he
had for a time desired to enter the ministry, but, after "wrestling
with the great cross" of leaving his father to conduct the business
alone, he had decided against it. On 17 July 1870 Fuller's father
died, leaving the young man in charge of the business, which was
renamed E. W. Fuller's.

By January 1871 he had completed the manuscript of his first
book, a lengthy revision of his didactic poem, The Angel in the
Cloud; it was published that summer by the transplanted Tar
Heel firm of E. J. Hale & Son in New York City. The book, which
received favorable notice in such newspapers as the New York
Times and the St. Louis Advocate, remains his
best-tailored literary production. An 1892 reviewer for The Wake
Forest Student, a North Carolina college magazine, said, the
poem "rises to almost Miltonic grandeur," and an 1876 obituary
notice in The Evening Review , Wilmington, N.C., opined
that, had he lived, Fuller might have become "the Milton of
America." The Angel in the Cloud was reprinted with a new
author's preface in 1872. In 1878 a third edition was brought
forth, enlarged to contain a twenty-five-page biographical sketch,
and a number of Fuller's minor poems. The book was reprinted again
in 1881 and, by the author's family, in 1907.

Fuller's novel, Sea-Gift, published by Hale in 1873, did
not achieve its greatest popularity until after his death. Its
frank treatment of sensitive aspects of southern life offended many North Carolinians who had been "inspired to rapture" by his religious poetry. It was to be a writer of prose,
however, rather than of poetry, that Fuller aspired. He was
sensitive to criticisms that his novel's manuscript was, in some
respects, crudely done, and he planned to make revisions but did
not live to do so. Sea-Gift is, in some respects,
autobiographical. It describes the youth of one John Smith, his
career at The University of North Carolina, and his participation
in the Civil War. The novel is interesting for a number of reasons.
It was the first novel set, in part, in the town of Chapel Hill.
Second, it contains a tall-tale telling contest including a
definition of the tall-tale presented over thirty years before Mark
Twain's essay was published on the same subject. Third, the plot
incorporates the university's "Dromgoole Myth" concerning a famous
duel fought near Piney Prospect in Chapel Hill. The book became
known as "The Freshman's Bible" in the latter nineteenth century
and its influence probably had a bearing on the formation of the
Order of the Gimghoul at The University of North Carolina and the
construction there of Gimghoul Castle. Finally, elements of the
Sea-Gift plot involving, first, a long train ride to enter
college, and second, the burning of a plantation house by Yankee
soldiers, may have influenced Thomas Wolfe and Margaret Mitchell in
the writing of their later novels, Look Homeward, Angel ,
and Gone With The Wind , respectively.

Fuller was interested in local politics and believed in
participating. He was elected, first, a town commissioner, next,
mayor of Louisburg, and, finally, a Franklin County
commissioner.

On 26 Sept. 1871, he married Mary Elisabeth Malone, daughter of
Dr. Ellis Malone of Louisburg. Their first child, Ethel Stuart, who
died in December 1874 at the age of sixteen months, inspired
several poems of mourning such as "The Last Look" and "Out in the
Rain," which were widely reprinted in newspapers in several states.
Another daughter, Edwin Sumner, was born only five weeks before the
author's death; she married Asa Parham of Henderson. The author's
only sister, Anna Richmond Fuller, married Dr. James Ellis Malone,
brother of Fuller's wife, in 1878.

Ill with consumption for many months before his death, Fuller
composed verses entitled "Lines, Written After Having a Hemorrhage
From the Lungs," which he instructed his wife to unseal and read
only after either his recovery or his death. He died after
dramatically dictating in his last moments a poem for the Ladies
Memorial Association of Wilmington, which was sung at Confederate
memorial services at Oakdale Cemetery by a choir of two thousand
persons on 10 May 1876.

Fuller died in Louisburg and was buried in the Green Hill House
Cemetery. He was a Democrat and a Methodist. A photographic
portrait and many of his letters belong to the Fuller-Thomas
Collection in the manuscript department of Duke University Library,
Durham. A limited edition of Sea-Gift was reprinted in
1940.